Winter when Lily and I take a bath together. Our bodies side-by-side, foot-to-hip. You can make it sexual if you want, but it isn’t.

Michael is in the other room reading. The bath water is almost too hot. Lily leans her head against the wall, her hair trailing in the water, the gold beads of her earrings glittering in the yellow light. She has a confession to make.

~

Michael and Lily.

Michael is tall with many tattoos. He has a stretch of thick black circles on his right arm, a black dandelion on his left shoulder. He reads a lot of Marx, and always has a fifth of bourbon on hand. He has small eyes but a defined jaw. He rolls his own cigarettes.

Lily is long and slender. Her body is a stretched-out hourglass. Her brown hair sweeps down her back to her waistline. She twists it into a tieless bun that gradually unravels. Her nose is pointed up and pierced with a small reflective stud.

~

My body is short and curved. I have cropped blonde hair. My hips and thighs are wide enough to fill a chair. My face is round, my eyes large and with long blonde eyelashes that I coat daily with mascara.

~

In the bath, Lily says, “Sorry.”

She says, “I kissed Michael.”

~

Michael is my roommate. Before Lily arrived, Michael and I lived in a kind of harmony. We drank bourbon and talked about dismantling capitalism. Sometimes Michael fell asleep in my bed. Nothing ever happened. We were just close, like children.

~

Lily arrived a month earlier. She’s on a road trip to see the country, to visit friends. Before she arrived, I thought of my body as body.

~

What can I tell you about Michael and Lily that will be surprising? Michael is bisexual, has been with as many men as women. Lily has never, to her knowledge, had an orgasm. When they walk together, they fit together. The puzzle of the body.

~

Lily says, “He’s not like the others.”

I adjust my feet in the bath, cross my ankles.

~

Winter in the high desert: do you know it? The way snow buries prickly pear. The javelina that shuffle across the road every morning, their breath visible in the cold air, their bodies steaming. The crisp blue of sky between snow. The sun that pierces through the trees to warm pavement. Ponderosas bright and orange against the blanketed earth.

~

As soon as Lily arrived, I began to lose weight. It was and wasn’t a byproduct of Lily. Lily with her slender shape. Me with my round face, my wide hips. The puzzle of the body.

~

In the bathtub, Lily says, “I like Michael” and “I’ve never felt this way before.”

~

I remember a night in my bed: Michael asleep beside me. We had been reading from The Golden Notebook. “Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all.” I remember Michael reading this and asking if I felt that way.

No, I said, I like women.

And I meant, I don’t dislike women, but what he heard was: I like women also. And now, in the bathtub with Lily, I’m thinking I do.

Or maybe I just like her: Lily.

Do you know the feeling?

I like her hips and her thighs and the heart they make in the water.

~

I continued to lose weight. My body. The way it moved through space. I wanted it to move differently.

~

Lily and Michael began their walks together while I was at work. I work at a café a half hour down the road. The café serves egg sandwiches that are stored in Ziploc bags and microwaved before serving. The egg sandwiches are popular and disgusting.

While on their walks, Lily and Michael become friends. One day, Michael slipped on some ice, and Lily helped him to his feet. In his boxers that night, Michael peeled up the fabric to reveal a bruise. He called Lily his hero; she laughed. I thought about egg sandwiches.

~

In the bathtub with Lily.

Lily says, “I like Michael, but he likes you.”

She says, “You should talk to him.”

I watch the light on her skin, the way it catches the water and shimmers there.

I close my eyes, still see her through my eyelids. The shape of her legs; heart of her hips; slim soft flesh of her belly; structure of her cheeks; her face. The puzzle of the body.

~

My weight loss caused mood swings. Michael noticed. He no longer offered me glasses full of bourbon after work like he used to. He worried. He tried to intervene.

~

The morning after the bath, Michael confronts me on my way to work.

 “Lily kissed me,” he says.

 “And?”

“And,” Michael says. “I don’t know. What do you make of it?”

I open my car door, and glance at the mirror. My round, fat face.

Michael says, “I think she likes me.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that puts me in a weird position.”

“Weird?”

Michael says, “Just tell me what to do about Lily.”

~

One month later, we get a postcard from Lily, addressed to both of us. It’s brief, bright. There’s a red canyon on the front.

The truth is: by the time I get the postcard, Lily has been gone for weeks, and Michael has moved out.

~

Do you know the spectrum of desire—wanting but not wanting?

Michael.

I want him but don’t. With Lily, my want is different.

~

The last thing I’ll say: the way my body changes. It shrinks and shrinks. Michael and Lily both gone. I stop eating almost entirely. I survive on coffee, bourbon, rice cakes, cigarettes. I sit on the porch and roll and smoke Michael’s leftover cigarettes. I watch the javelinas—with young ones now. I smoke. I wait.

If I can just make myself small enough, they will come back to me.